filme noir
> about the story
The story is about a dodgy male detective who meets a client who swears she is being followed. The client is a jazz club singer. During the investigation, he realizes that he’s being followed too. The motives are very obscure. There is also the Club’s Owner, a totally disloyal guy to whom she debts some money.
The singer mysteriously acquires new shapes – some very bizarre – during her presentations. In despair, she begs for the case to be solved as quickly as possible. The detective, who learns more and more about his role in this plot as time passes, decides to flee with her from that city. He will give her his few savings, in order to pay what she debts to the Club’s Owner. While he is getting the money at the bank, she disappears.
Starring: Mariane Gutierrez, Maria Rêgo Barros, Liliane Xavier, Márcio Nascimento and Márcio Newlands
Direction and stageplay: Miguel Vellinho
Sets and properties: Carlos Alberto Nunes
Actors and puppets costumes: Kika de Medina
Lighting: Renato Machado
Soundtrack: Maurício Durão
Narration: Renato Peres
Choreography: Claudia Radusewski
Puppets’ confection: Maria Rêgo Barros, Márcio Newlands and Miguel Vellinho
Puppets’ sculpture: Flávia Vitralli and Bernardo Macedo
Graphic design: Ato Gráfico – Hannah and Marcos Corrêa
Photography: Simone Rodrigues
Production Director: Valéria Seabra
> About the Show
Since the beginning of the company in 1999, Pequod has been testing the limits of a specific Animation Theatre technique: Bunraku’s direct manipulation. In this huge work of research, the proximity to the cinematographic language was always intense, what renewed – by an amazing way – this theatrical modality, always so underestimated. The group did it with the shows SANGUE BOM (Nice Blood, 1999), NOITE FELIZ – UM AUTO DE NATAL (Silent Night – A Christmas Tale, 2001) and O VELHO DA HORTA (The old man’s vegetable-garden, 2002). Now the company improves itself daring everyone with FILME NOIR.
Pequod’s new work is its more moviesque show. FILME NOIR adapts for the Puppet Theatre the formerly cinematographic style that gives its name to the play, trying on all the stage possibilities. The show is full of typical elements from noir cinema, such as the fatal woman, the tough detective, the distress atmosphere, the voice-over narration, the flashbacks and many others. But nothing of it would make any sense if the play was not totally in black-and-white, challenge that demanded deep study and research of costumes, sets and illumination. Even the natural yellow light from the lamps’ filaments needed to be eliminated. The direction had to pass by complex tasks such as reproduce in the theatre the effect of the camera’s framing and movements observed in cinema. Efforts weren’t measured for the creation of the most adequate look to a police story passed in the 1940’s, full of puppeteers and puppets. But the play’s theme is, in fact, the art of working with puppets in the theatre.
The audience’s respect and the critical acclaim are what strengths the idea that the company should always risk something new. And even though FILME NOIRs inspiration comes from cinema, jazz, Will Eisner’s comics and Weegee’s photos, Pequod makes Theatre above all.
> What is Noir?
Noire is not a genre, but a cinematographic style whose classical period went from the 1940’s to the 1960’s. They were mainly American criminal films with expressionist illumination and black-and-white cinematography, obscure under many aspects. The screenplays brought a disillusion mood of corruption, suspicion and anxiety. Morally ambiguous, the characters were anti-heroes, private eyes, policemen, assassins and dangerous beautiful women. The narratives were complex and used resources like the flashback and the voice-over. The action was held, above all, in closed and dark environments. The rare sequences in open air were night-shots and showed almost empty big cities’ streets. As A. C. Gomes de Mattos says in his book O Outro Lado da Noite: Filme Noir, it was the French critics who gave name to the style, shortly after the Second World War.
